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The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann, Volume I

THE DRAMATIC WORKS

OF

GERHART HAUPTMANN

(Authorized Edition)

Edited By LUDWIG LEWISOHN

Assistant Professor in The Ohio State University

VOLUME ONE: SOCIAL DRAMAS

1912

PREFACE

The present edition of Hauptmann’s works contains all of his plays with
the exception of a few inconsiderable fragments and the historical dramaFlorian Geyer. The latter has been excluded by reason of its greatlength, its divergence from the characteristic moods of Hauptmann’s art,and that failure of high success which the author himself has implicitlyacknowledged. The arrangement of the volumes follows, with suchmodifications as the increase of material has made necessary, the methodused by Hauptmann in the first and hitherto the only collected edition ofhis dramas. Five plays are presented here which that edition did notinclude, and hence the present collection gives the completest view nowattainable of Hauptmann’s activity as a dramatist.

The translation of the plays, seven of which are written entirely in
dialect, offered a problem of unusual difficulty. The easiest solution,that namely, of rendering the speech of the Silesian peasants or theBerlin populace into some existing dialect of English, I was forced toreject at once. A very definite set of associative values would thus havebeen gained for the language of Hauptmann’s characters, but of valuesradically different from those suggested in the original. I found itnecessary, therefore, to invent a dialect near enough to the English ofthe common people to convince the reader or spectator, yet not so near tothe usage of any class or locality as to interpose between him andHauptmann’s characters an Irish or a Cockney, a Southern or a New Englandatmosphere. Into this dialect, with which the work of my collaboratorshas been made to conform, I have sought to render as justly and asexactly as possible the intensely idiomatic speech that Hauptmannemploys. In doing this I have had to take occasional liberties with mytext, but I have tried to reduce these to a minimum, and always to makethem serve a closer interpretation of the original shade of thought orturn of expression. The rendering of the plays written in normal literaryprose or verse needs no such explanation nor the plea for a measure ofcritical indulgence which that explanation implies.

I owe hearty thanks to Dr. Hauptmann for the promptness and cordiality
with which he has either rectified or confirmed my view of thedevelopment and meaning of his thought and art as stated in theIntroduction, and to my wife for faithful assistance in the preparationof these volumes.

LUDWIG LEWISOHN.

COLUMBUS, O., June, 1912.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTIONBy the Editor.

BEFORE DAWN (Vor Sonnenaufgang)Translated by the Editor.

THE WEAVERS (Die Weber)Translated by Mary Morison.

THE BEAVER COAT (Der Biberpelz)Translated by the Editor.

THE CONFLAGRATION (Der rote Hahn)Translated by the Editor.

INTRODUCTION

I

Gerhart Hauptmann, the most distinguished of modern German dramatists,
was born in the Silesian village of Obersalzbrunn on November 15, 1862.By descent he springs immediately from the common people of his nativeprovince to whose life he has so often given the graveness of tragedy andthe permanence of literature. His grandfather, Ehrenfried, felt in hisown person the bitter fate of the Silesian weavers and only throughenergy and good fortune was enabled to change his trade to that of awaiter. By 1824 he was an independent inn-keeper and was followed in thesame business by the poet’s father, Robert Hauptmann. The latter, a manof solid and not uncultivated understanding, married Marie Straehler,daughter of one of the fervent Moravian households of Silesia, and hadbecome, when his sons Carl and Gerhart were born, the proprietor of awell-known and prosperous hotel, Zur Preussischen Krone.

From the village-school of Obersalzbrunn, where he was but an idle pupil,
Gerhart was sent in 1874 to the Realschule at Breslau. Here, in thecompany of his older brothers, Carl and Georg, the lad remained fornearly four years, having impressed his teachers most strongly, itappears, by a lack of attention. For this reason, but also perhapsbecause his father, injured by competitors and by a change in localconditions, had lost his independence, Gerhart was withdrawn from schoolin 1878. He was next to become a farmer and, to this end, was placed inthe pious family of an uncle. Gradually, however, artistic impulses beganto disengage themselves—he had long modelled in a desultory way—and inOctober, 1880, at the advice of his maturer brother Carl Hauptmannproceeded to Breslau and was enrolled as a student in the Royal Collegeof Art.

The value of this restless shifting in his early years is apparent. For
the discontent that marked his unquiet youth made for a firm retention ofimpressions. Observation, in the saying of Balzac, springs fromsuffering, and Hauptmann saw the Silesian country-folk and the artists ofBreslau with an almost morbid exactness of vision. Actual conflictsharpened his insight. Three weeks after entering the art-school hereceived a disciplinary warning and early in 1881 he was rusticated foreleven weeks. Nevertheless he remained in Breslau until April, 1882, whenhe joined his brother Carl and became a special student at the Universityof Jena. Here he heard lectures by Liebmann, Eucken and Haeckel. But theacademic life did not hold him long. Scarcely a year passed and Hauptmannis found at Hamburg, the guest of his future parents-in-law and hisbrother’s. Thence he set out on an Italian journey, travelling by way ofSpain and the South of France to Genoa, and visiting Naples, Capri andRome. Although his delight in these places was diminished by his keensocial consciousness, he returned to Italy the following year (1884) and,for a time, had a sculptor’s studio in Rome. Overtaken here by typhoidfever, he was nursed back to health by his future wife, Marie Thienemann,and returned to Germany to gather strength at the Thienemann countryhouse.

So far, sculpture had held him primarily; it was now that the poetic
impulse asserted itself. Seeking a synthesis of these tendencies in athird art, Hauptmann determined, for a time, to adopt the calling of anactor. To this end he went to Berlin. Here, however, the interest inliterature soon grew to dominate every other and, in 1885, the year ofhis marriage to Fraulein Thienemann, he published his first work:Promethidenlos.

The poem is romantic and amorphous and gives but the faintest promise of
the masterly handling of verse to be found in The Sunken Bell andHenry of Aue. Its interest resides solely in its confirmation of thefacts of Hauptmann’s development. For the hero of Promethidenlosvacillates between poetry and sculpture, but is able to give himselffreely to neither art because of his overwhelming sense of socialinjustice and human suffering. And this, in brief, was the state ofHauptmann’s mind when, in the autumn of 1885, he settled with his youngwife in the Berlin suburb of Erkner.

The years of his residence here are memorable and have already become the
subject of study and investigation. And rightly so; for during this timethere took place that impact of the many obscure tendencies of the ageupon the most sensitive and gifted of German minds from which sprang thenaturalistic movement. That movement dominated literature for a fewyears. Then, in Hauptmann’s own temper and in his own work, arose avigorous idealistic reaction which, blending with the severe techniqueand incorruptible observation of naturalism, went far towardproducing—for a second time—a new vision and a new art. The conditionsamid which this development originated are essential to a fullunderstanding of Hauptmann’s work.

II

At the end of the Franco-Prussian war, united Germany looked forward to a
literary movement commensurate with her new greatness. That movement didnot appear. It was forgotten that men in the maturity of their years andpowers could not suddenly change character and method and that the riseof a new generation was needed. So soon, however, as the first members ofthat generation became articulate, a bitter and almost merciless warfarearose in literature and in the drama. The brothers Heinrich and JuliusHart, vigorous in both critical and creative activity, asserted as earlyas 1882 that German literature was then, at its best, the faint imitationof an outworn classicism, and the German drama a transference of thebasest French models. It is easy to see to-day that their view waspartisan and narrow. Neither Wilbrandt and Heyse, on the one hand, norLindau and L’Arronge, on the other, represented the whole literaryactivity of the empire. It is equally easy, however, to understand theirimpatience with a literature which, upon the whole, lacked any breath ofgreatness, and handled the stuff of human life with so little freshness,incisiveness and truth.

What direction was the new literature to take? The decisive influence
was, almost necessarily, that of the naturalistic writers of France. Forthe tendencies of these men coincided with Germany’s growing interest inscience and growing rejection of traditional religion and philosophy.Tolstoi, Ibsen and Strindberg each contributed his share to the movement.But all the young critics of the eighties fought the battles of Zola withhim and repeated, sometimes word for word, the memorable creed of Frenchnaturalism formulated long before by the Goncourt brothers: “Themodern—everything for the artist is there: in the sensation, theintuition of the contemporary, of this spectacle of life with which onerubs elbows!” Such, with whatever later developments, was the centraldoctrine of young Germany in the eighties; such the belief that graduallyexpressed itself in a number of definite organisations and publications.

The most noteworthy of these, prior to the founding of the Freie Bühne,
were the magazine Die Gesellschaft (1885), edited by Michael Conrad,the most ardent of German Zolaists, and the society Durch (1886), inwhich the revolutionary spirits of Berlin united to promulgate the artcanons of the future. “Literature and criticism,” Conrad declared, mustfirst of all be “liberated from the tyranny of the conventional younglady:” the programme of Durch announced that the poet must givecreative embodiment to the life of the present, that he shall show ushuman beings of flesh and blood and depict their passions with implacablefidelity; that the ideal of art was no longer the Antique, but theModern. Nor was there wanting creative activity in the spirit of theseviews. Franzos and Kretzer, to name but a few, originated the modernrealistic novel in Germany, and Liliencron brought back vigour andconcreteness to the lyric.

Into the tense atmosphere of this literary battle Hauptmann was cast when
he took up his residence at Erkner. The house he occupied was the last inthe village, half buried in woods and with far prospects over the heathsand deep green, melancholy waters of Brandenburg. Hither came, among manyothers, the brothers Hart, the novelist Kretzer, Wilhelm Bölsche, theinexhaustible prophet of the new science and the new art, and finally,the founder of German naturalism as distinguished from that ofFrance—Arno Holz, The efforts of all these men harmonised withHauptmann’s mood. Naturalistic art goes for its subject matter to theforgotten and disinherited of the earth, and it was with these thatHauptmann was primarily concerned. He read Darwin and Karl Marx,Saint-Simon and Zola. He was absorbed not by any problem of art but bythe being and fate of humanity itself.

Under these influences and governed by such thoughts, he began his career
as a man of letters anew. But his progress was slow and uncertain. In1887 he published in Conrad’s Gesellschaft an episodic story,Bahnwärter Thiel, weak in narrative technique and obviously inspired byZola. Even the sudden expansion of human characters into demonic symbolsof their ruling passions is imitated. The medium clearly irked him andgave him no opportunity for personal expression. For many months hisactivity was tentative and fruitless. Early in 1889, however, Arno Holz,known until then only by a volume of brave and resonant verse, visitedErkner and brought with him his theory of “consistent naturalism” asillustrated by Papa Hamlet and Die Familie Selicke, sketches and adrama in manuscript. This meeting gave Hauptmann one of thoseilluminating technical hints which every creative artist knows. Itbrought him an immediate method such as neither Tolstoi nor Dostoievskyhad been able to bring, and decided him for naturalism and for the drama.He had found himself at last. During a visit to his parents he gavehimself up to intense labour and returned to Berlin in the spring of 1889with his first drama, Before Dawn, completed.

The play might have waited indefinitely for performance, had not Otto
Brahm and Paul Schlenther, both critical thinkers of some significance,founded the free stage society (Freie Bühne) earlier in the same year.It was the aim of this society to give at least eight annual performancesin the city of Berlin which should be wholly free from the influence ofthe censor and from the pressure of economic needs. The greater number ofthe first series of performances had already been prepared for by aselection of foreign plays—Tolstoi, Goncourt, Ibsen, Björnsen,Strindberg—when, at the last moment, a young German dramatist presentedhimself and succeeded in having his play accepted. Thus the society, longsince dead, had the good fortune of fulfilling the function for which itwas created: it launched the naturalistic movement; it cradled the moderndrama of Germany.

The first performance of Before Dawn (Oct. 20, 1889) was tumultuous. It
recalled the famous Hernani battle of French romanticism. But thevictory of Hauptmann was not long in doubt. With his third play heconquered the national stage of which he has since been, with whatevervariations of immediate success, the undisputed master.

III

The “consistent naturalism” of Holz and his collaborator Johannes Schlaf
is the technical foundation of Hauptmann’s work. He has long transcendedits narrow theory and the shallow positivism on which it was based. Itdiscarded verse and he has written great verse; it banished the past fromart and he has gone to legend and history for his subjects; it forbadethe use of symbols and he has, at times, made an approach to his meaningunnecessarily difficult. But Hauptmann has never quite abandoned thepractice of that form of art which resulted from the theories of Holz.From history and poetry he has always returned to the naturalistic drama.Rose Bernd follows Henry of Aue, and Griselda immediately precededThe Rats. Nor is this all. The methods of naturalism have followed himinto the domains of poetry and of the past. His verse is scrupulouslydevoid of rhetoric; the psychology of his historic plays is sober andhuman. Hence it is clear that an analysis of the consistent naturalism ofGerman literature is, with whatever modifications, an analysis ofHauptmann’s work in its totality. Like nearly all the greater dramatistshe had his forerunners and his prophets: he proceeds from a school of artand thought which, even in transcending, he illustrates.

The consistent naturalists, then, aimed not to found a new art but, in
any traditional sense, to abandon it. They desired to reduce theconventions of technique to a minimum and to eliminate the writer’spersonality even where Zola had admitted its necessary presence—in thechoice of subject and in form. For style, the very religion of the Frenchnaturalistic masters, there was held to be no place, since there was tobe, in this new literature, neither direct exposition, howeverimpersonal, nor narrative. In other words, none of the means ofrepresentation were to be used by which art achieves the illusion oflife; since art, in fact, was no longer to create the illusion ofreality, but to be reality. The founders of the school would haveadmitted that the French had done much by the elimination of intrigue anda liberal choice of theme. They would still have seen—and rightlyaccording to their premises—creative vision and not truth even in theoppressive pathology of Germinie Lacerteux and the morbid brutalitiesof La Terre. The opinion of Flaubert that any subject suffices, if thetreatment be excellent, was modified into: there must be neitherintentional choice of theme nor stylistic treatment. For style supposesrearrangement, personal vision, unjust selection of detail, andliterature must be an exact rendition of the actual.